Enter the Matrix leads the pack in the coupling of movie/video games. All Enter the Matrix images courtesy of Atari.

Once upon a time a “good” videogame was little more than blips on a screen. From the mid-‘80s Pong by Atari to 1991 and Carnack and Romero’s revolutionary first person shooter, Doom, gaming was more about hand dexterity than eye candy.

But all that has changed.

In order to meet the consumers expectations for entertainment fare similar to that being produced by Hollywood, game developers are turning to “bytes” of software such as XSI by Softimage of Quebec, Canada.

This software that takes advantage of the powerful engines being provided by today’s Xbox, PlayStation 2 and Nintendo gaming consoles, allowing game developers to create the consumer used software that is a video game.

Gareth Morgan of Softimage says its product XSI responds to artists’ needs to create detailed work in a limited amount of time.

“The market has changed quite rapidly,” said Gareth Morgan, product manager Interactive Media Tools, Softimage. “Ten years ago every game developer was primarily a technology company, with wholly proprietary engines, forced to reinvent the wheel with each title. For content creation tool vendors, it was tough — like trying to hit a moving target.

“Today there are a series of established rendering platforms such as OpenGL and DirectX, and game engine platforms like Renderware, Quake, and Gamebryo, which gives us a more stable, mature target, which means it’s easier to create higher-level tools ”

Similarly, Softimage has evolved their focus to help serve a broad entertainment market that seeks high visual and production qualities in their film and gaming pastimes.

Yet there is a point where the parallel between movie and game diverges.

For example, the entertainment at the Cineplex is totally linear, moving from one scene to the next, creating a bit of film that is never changing.

“It’s Jet Li on line 1”: The legendary martial artist called SCEA to inquire about working together on a game. All Rise to Honor images courtesy of Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA).

The video game, however, offers an experience in which a whole world is created, and entered into — a world that changes depending on whether the player decides to open a door, jump onto a box or decipher a code.

For software vendors such as Softimage, one challenge has been to create a tool that serves both sides of the game development team: the art centric that creates the visual look of the environments — the props and characters —and the programming teams that create the software that eventually spins in your PlayStation 2.

“One of the challenges that we try to solve for game developers is the need to create an effect that may last only sixty seconds in a game but that has the same impact as an effect that could last 10 times that long on film,” Morgan added.

Game developers also need to consider the types of environments, props, characters and architectures that will reside in their worlds. The process of creating a racing game, such as Grand Prix Challenge, differs greatly from the creation of a character-centric game.

For the racing game, the environment is filled with racecars within a fairly static environment. And while the cars may move dynamically, the architecture of the car is far simpler than the architecture of a character, which requires articulated bones, skin, gestures — all characteristic that must be exported to the game engine to simulate a believable living breathing entity.